


sleep always like this (the flesh calmly going cold)

by coincidental



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Buried Alive, Gen, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-08
Updated: 2018-10-08
Packaged: 2019-07-28 02:47:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16232636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coincidental/pseuds/coincidental
Summary: The first time he crawls from his grave it is into his mother’s waiting arms. He is six years old, cold and afraid. She rocks him against her chest, brushing the grave dirt from his hair. He hears the gasping wetness of her sobs and the emotion ricochets through him in turn.He was dead only an hour, the fever sweat not dry on his skin when his mother had buried him. “You must always be buried,” she whispers to him as she tucks the blanket around him in a comforting nest of warmth. She kisses his forehead and strokes back the baby soft purple curls from his forehead. “From dirt we come again and again.”I'm fixing what hurts.





	sleep always like this (the flesh calmly going cold)

**Author's Note:**

> I couldn't get this idea from my head that Molly might die but he will always rise again.  
> Responses were distressed but encouraging, so I wrote the thing!  
> I hope y'all like it?  
> x

The first time he crawls from his grave it is into his mother’s waiting arms. He is six years old, cold and afraid. She rocks him against her chest, brushing the grave dirt from his hair. He hears the gasping wetness of her sobs and the emotion ricochets through him in turn.  
  
When they are both done with tears, she lifts him, small as he is, and carries him into their home, into the hearth lit warmth of it and the cocoon of safety it represents.

She tells him a story. It is the story of a family both blessed and cursed, of many deaths and many lives, of memories slowly forgotten. It is both story and history and rules to live and die by. He breathes in the scent of her perfume and clutches close to her as the soft cadence of her voice weaves a tale he would never have believed any day but this, with the cold of the ground still clinging to him on the inside. It is a big feeling for being only six.  
  
He was dead only an hour, the fever sweat not dry on his skin when his mother had buried him. “You must always be buried,” she whispers to him as she tucks the blanket around him in a comforting nest of warmth. She kisses his forehead and strokes back the baby soft purple curls from his forehead. “From dirt we come again and again.”  
  
He sleeps, and dreams of new dawns, the sun rising again and again and again.  


* * *

  
At fourteen he scrambles out of the loose dirt gasping for breath, nails clawing at the ground. A stranger pulls him into an embrace, rubbing his back and soothing his panting, strangled inhalations until drawing breath is no longer a fight. She strokes his hair and calls him her darling, her baby, her boy. He does not know her.

  
It takes him a full day of mistrust until he cries in his mother’s arms once more. He looks up from the hot drink he cradles between his cold hands and a curtain sweeps aside, filling his mind with clarity and her face is so achingly familiar and lovely and he stumbles to her, more afraid than he had been lacking knowledge of her.

“Please, my love, my lovely boy, you must be careful, one day you will not come back to me.”  
The fear in her voice is visceral and her hands shake.  
“I thought we would always come back?”

“Not all of you does,” she whispers. She cards her fingers through his tangled curls, gently smoothing it around the jut of his adolescent horns. “It exacts a price, my darling, it always takes its due. The day you were born, your father buried us both. He cared for you a week without me, and when I came in to find you both, I did not remember having had you. That death stole that from me for a number of months. It can take time for memories to return, but some will never come back.” He shivers at the thought.

  
He was dead two days this time, whilst she kept vigil and waited for him. He knows because she tells him, because he must understand that it will take its toll, its time, its pound of flesh.  


* * *

  
At seventeen he vacates frosted rimed earth alone, twilight stealing colour from the world. He shivers, shudders, limbs stiff and numb with cold. The grave site is shoddily dug, shallow, only yards from the gaping dark doorway of a small cottage.  
  
The door hangs on one hinge, wood splintered, the inside a cavernous maw of blackness. The place is a ruin of broken furniture and destroyed belongings, fractured parts of what look to be carefully wrought carved wooden chairs, shattered clay bowls and plates, the dusty shards gleaming with colour and rich pattern. The boy does not know where he is or what has happened here.

Outside, snow falls, light flakes building to thicker clumps, dense and hard to see any distance. He lights a fire made of broken parts and searches for answers in the ruins.  
  
He finds a body, in his search, a woman, her dark hair a bloody tangle, her skin greying and cold. He tries to move her and must immediately stumble to the door, standing in the snow to upheave the meagre contents of his stomach - he cannot wipe the image of the misshapen back of her skull from his mind. He tells himself he will bury her in dignity when the snow stops, when his stomach settles, when he gets his bearings. The snow does not stop.  
  
He leaves, eventually, wrapped in stolen rags with a stolen bag on his back, trudging through the snow in search of someone alive in the world but for him. The village he finds close by looks much like the house he spent the last few days in - wrecked, destroyed, some of it burnt out. He does not look inside, remembers the nausea and the violent heave of his stomach. He can’t look.  
  
Two and a half weeks later, or thereabouts, in a city he doesn’t know, surrounded by strangers, he remembers his mother’s face, then he remembers the river weed wet tangle of her hair and the sickening reshaping of her. He cannot find his balance, leaning against the stone wall of an alley with a moan and sliding to the ground. The sound that escapes him is wretched, grief surging up to drown him.

He left her unburied. It has been too long. She will not come back. He clutches his pack and he sobs.  


* * *

  
The fourth time, and the fifth, the gaps lengthen like shadows in late afternoon sun, casting a shade over him. He does not know how long he lies in the ground, maybe a week or more, then a month and some.

It takes months for the memories to resurface too, longer than ever before, for him to find his own name and his story and take it to heart. Those months he lives on the fringe of the world, lonely and disconnected from even the fragile life he has built himself. Whenever he comes back, a little of him is gone and it changes him in ways that surprise him. He thinks he must have liked that bauble, that coat, that throw, but as parts of him leave, the rest is forced to rearrange to bridge the gaps. Things don’t fit the same when the dust settles.

After the fifth time, he writes it down, every memory he still possesses. It is hard to know you have forgotten something when you cannot remember having known it before, but he knows he must have had a mother because he knows she told him what it would mean to rise again and again and leave a little of yourself in the grave each time. But she is a hollow space, a concept. He cannot recall her face, her name, her voice. He does not know which death stole her from him.

He writes of his acquaintances, of his life, his work and his time, so the person that crawls from the grave next might understand, at least a little, might find their feet quicker. He’s unsure how long it will take to awaken the next time and thinks the world will forget him one day. He forgets himself, after all. He thinks he should be less afraid, but the rank stink of fear lingers perpetually. All mortals fear death, it’s natural, he fears death again and again and again.  


* * *

  
The sixth time, he wakes shrouded and afraid. Afraid because he cannot breathe and he cannot move. The struggle to free his hands and to dig and claw through the choking dirt fills him with dread. He thinks, for a moment, that he won’t get out, he’ll die in the dirt and be stuck in an endless cycle of death and rebirth into darkness and suffocation and cold.

His hand breaches the surface and his scrabbling desperation to reach the air is frantic and weak. He emerges gasping, a drowning man offered a reprieve. Lying half submerged in the dirt, his cheek and chest to the ground, he sobs his relief through deep lungfuls of cool air.  

Lying there, the first droplets of rain are welcoming on his skin. By the time he is free of the cloying, clinging dirt, the grime is being cleansed from him by a torrential downpour. With rain trickling down his spine and clothes sodden and stuck to his skin, he realises he does not know his own name and wonders as the lack of concern he feels for that. He looks over himself, dressed in nondescript, simple clothes. He feels like he’s missing something important, but nothing but the clothes on his back are on his person. There’s a lightness in that, despite everything.  
  
He names himself, this time, vague memories of his life no clue to the truth. Walking to a nearby town he is greeted with eyes both distressed and curious, murmurs of; “Did he not die? I thought he died.” A tabaxi, who introduces herself as Cree, watches him with a critical gaze and offers him a dry shirt and a drink.

That night, He vows he will die ever again.  
“Again?” Cree asks.  
“Again,” he asserts, a darkness in his eyes that only a man that has crawled from his own grave can aspire to.

He christens his body with wine, lacking in its own history, and spins a tale of blood and magic. He tells the tabaxi that his name is Lucien. He likes the way the name rolls from his tongue, fluid, slippery and sibilant. It’s not a lie, just a new kind of truth.

It’s almost a full turn of the seasons before the curtain lifts and Lucien remembers. The pieces of his reinvention are too settled to be changed now, but he examines his own limited memories of the past with a disconnected fascination as it unravels. His true name never comes back.

Despite his own confidence, his security, the blade at his hip and the blood beneath his skin he wields in violent abandon, his past reminds him what it is to be afraid. That night, he sits and talks with Cree in confidence and demands a promise be kept. If he falls, bury him, bury him beneath the dirt and wait.

 

* * *

 

The woods are made of shadow, the light of the moon tarring it all in the same shades of grey and black. Beneath a sprawling twisted tree, the leaves rustle and the earth shifts. A muddied, pale hand stretches from the ground, reaching up towards the sky. The ground is tumultuous suddenly, earth, leaves and debris shifting, dislodged by a shape rising from the ground the ground.

As the loose components of the forest floor drop away, a man sits, shivering. His eyes are unfocused, upturned, the luminous glow of the moon making them gleam, a white orb reflected back on their surface.

He shudders, he breathes deep. He knows… nothing at all, nothing but the crisp frosted leaves beneath his hands and the cold rough dirt, nothing but the moon looking down on him, benevolent gaze the only grace that has him waking to light instead of pitch darkness.

He knows in his bones that he was dead and now he is not, there is nothing else though. He is scraped clean inside, a dark empty shell devoid of anything that might make him.  
“Empty,” he murmurs, voice a crackling, hoarse whisper, dry as brittle wood, snapping.

Strangers find him, wandering in gaunt, pale exhaustion. They fill him with warmth, they dress him, they feed him. He is still lacking a person beneath his skin. It takes a long time before he finds the will to accept that he will be nothing he does not make himself. So he builds the kind of person he would like to be and fits himself to the mold.

Mollymauk Tealeaf is a showman, a peacock and a good friend. He is cheeky, charming and delightfully dishonest by turn. He is good at cards, at tarot, and swords. He is a riot of colour. He speaks his mind, he owns his scars, he protects what he loves, and when he does love it is cautious then all at once, wholehearted.

He is not the shell who woke in a wood of black, white and grey. The moon remains his constant though, from the moment his eyes open until his world goes dark.

 

* * *

 

He wakes. The earth over him is tangled with thin winding roots. He presses through, out, up. He breathes deep of fragrant, warm summer air. It smells like flowers. He rests his head back on soft, thick grass and blooms and he does nothing more than exist, for a while.

He doesn’t know much, but he knows he is alive and that is a gift.

As he emerges from the ground, he digs out the half rotted remains of some kind of rug he had been wrapped in. The parts that are left are threaded with silver and gold, glinting beneath the dirt. It was likely beautiful once. On his own form, the clothing hanging from him is partially decomposed, hanging in tatters, but for tall leather boots and a belt and- and a piece of parchment. Treated, it must be, with something to withstand time and dirt and decay.

The ink is faded but the writing is precise. _’Your name is Mollymauk Tealeaf. You are a member of The Mighty Nein. Go find the Gentleman in Zadash and ask for us.’_

He has nothing, but now, now he has this, this tangible piece of something from whoever laid him to rest. He glances about himself, taking in the rising ground of two hills and the rolling landscape stretching to the skyline. The grass around him is lush, but only over his grave are their flowers. Whoever buried him here cared for him.

He gets unsteadily to his feet and picks up the note, a blade resting in the tattered remains of his shroud and he looks both ways.

The road stretches as far as his eyes can see, but the sun is warm on his skin, so he picks a direction and begins to walk.

His name is Mollymauk Tealeaf, he is a member of The Mighty Nein. He is going to find them, and perhaps, find himself.

  


**Author's Note:**

> Comments and/or kudos are always the best, let me know if you liked it!


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